The UK Higher Education and research sector has access to an extensive repository infrastructure (with some 200 institutional repositories and many subject/discipline repositories). Public funding of projects by community organisations over the last few years is producing many digital assets (such as images, audio, video and other materials), including for example the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Our Heritage programme. However, the SCA has identified that some of these digital assets may not be accessible or usable in the medium-to-long term as they are not supported by any robust curation/repository infrastructure.e.

The overall objective of the study is to investigate the feasibility of the use of digital infrastructure solution(s) to provide long term access and use of these ‘unsupported’ digital assets. The study has a two-phase approach. The scoping phase covers information gathering investigating selected issues using an options approach, developing and assessing overall options, down-selecting two/three options for writing up in the interim report. The second phase will develop the selected options and produce overall recommendations. The study will complete in early 2014.

Please contact Sarah Fahmy (s.fahmy@jisc.ac.uk) for further details on this exciting piece of work.